Automated Test 3 ways of doing.

In 2017 we could say there are 3 ways of doing Automated test. The typology of the these 3 ways are based on their cost maintainability.

The most easy one but the most complex to maintain is the Record type. All the commercial tools and even Selenium with Selenium IDE, propose this way of doing. But when the SUT (system under test) is changing the automated test could be drastically compromised and need a full rework of the test script.

The second way and more developer oriented is the Scripted type. The maintainability is less complex and could be handle some design change if the script and the UI is properly identified.

The third one is based on Workflow and Data Driven type, there are still scripts but there are more easy to maintain. If a step in the workflow changes, you just need to change those steps. Almost all the commercial tools are proposing these kind of way of doing. With Selenium if you use the BDD with Cucumber will work in that way.

Now in term of implementation the most expensive in maintenance is the most easy to implement.

So when it the time to choose which way you want to implement tests you need forecast how complex, how many tests you want and how many time they are run.